The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sublime SF and Human Choices, Changes, and Relationships Ken Liu says about The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020), “Rather than worrying about which stories would make the ‘best’ collection for imaginary readers I decided to stick with stories that most pleased myself.” Is that why I ended up preferring his earlier collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)? The more recent collection makes a neat “meta-narrative,” as its nineteen well-written stories coalesce around ghosts, identity, memory, morality, technology, civilization, nature, and families, but the result is less varied than his earlier collection. 1. Ghost Days Three times, places, and protagonists: 2313 Nova Pacifica and a "human" girl bioengineered to suit her toxic world; 1989 East Norbury CT and a Chinese immigrant trying to fit in to high school; 1905 Hong Kong and an anglicized young man trying to understand his father. Past and future, parents and children, immigrants and aliens, story and authenticity: “Digging into the past was an art of comprehension, making sense of the universe.” 4 stars. 2. Maxwell's Demon During WWII, the US authorities force a Japanese American woman to “defect” to Japan to spy on Japanese scientists, one of whom hopes to find a “demon” to separate fast moving air molecules from slow ones to get more energy. Can or should Takako train the ghosts of Chinese slave laborers killed by the Japanese? “No matter what she did people would die.” 4 stars 3. The Reborn Aliens who conquered Earth are now seemingly benign immigrants marrying cooperative earthlings. The human protagonist’s job catching vengeful xenophobic humans leads him to upsetting questions about his past, memory, and identity. 3 stars. 4. Thoughts and Prayers A family falls apart when a mass shooter kills one of two daughters, and the mother has a VR documentary made about her daughter’s life, so internet trolls target her despite her digital “armor,” all highlighting memory, reality, technology, and American “freedom” and guns. 5 stars 5. Byzantine Empathy Virtual reality, crypto currency, human disasters, charities. Liu tells the story from the point of view of two women who were university roommates and now have very different ideas about how to make the world a better place based on empathy or reason. 4 stars 6. The Gods Will Not Be Chained Bullied at school, Maddie is missing her deceased father when she’s contacted via chat window and emojicons by his digitally uploaded consciousness. Will such post-humans be content doing the same work they did when human? (Liu imposes a dramatic limit on his digital mind stories: consciousness cannot be uploaded without destroying the original.) 4 stars. 7. Staying Behind A small number of mortal human beings refuse to have their consciousnesses uploaded to join the digital post-human colony of immortal minds. What happens when the mortal narrator has to deal with his daughter and her boyfriend making a different choice? 4 stars. 8. Real Artists Satire on the use of computers and technology in making movies that strike emotional chords with the audience. Are the movie makers artists? Or is the software the artist? 3 stars. 9. The Gods Will Not Be Slain An unseen digital war: resentful uploaded post-human gods decide to destroy human civilization by goading mutually hostile countries into starting wars, while some uploaded post-human gods like the father of Maddie from the earlier story try to thwart them. 4 stars 10. Altogether Elsewhere Vast Herds of Reindeer Real Earth reverts to flora and fauna as 300 billion “human beings” live in a data center as uploaded consciousnesses, communicating via thought and designing multi-dimensional worlds. A mother takes her daughter on an eye-opening real world day trip: “Anything real must die.” 4 stars 11. The Gods Have Not Died in Vain Maddie and her cloud-born digital sister Mist (“a creature of pure computation, never having existed in the flesh”) try to prevent the uploaded “gods” from returning to life, but life in a data center without bodies, death, or rich/poor is appealing after a world of scarcity. Aren’t we all just electric signals anyway? 4 stars 12. Memories of My Mother A strange and moving relationship: a 25-year-old mother with two more years to live makes time with her daughter last longer via lots of fast space travel, so that, while not really aging, she meets her daughter when she’s a little girl, 17, 33, and 80. 4 stars 13. Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts A wealthy hermit philosopher floats around on “Old Blue” (earth) above Sunken Boston after all the ice caps have melted and drowned most of the cities. Humanity’s capacity for adaptation to and exploitation of nature: “We dare not stop striving to find out who we are.” 3 stars 14. Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard In the far future, a midden-miner sifts through the detritus of the ancients like plastics and electrical circuits, until to save her brother she becomes a hero wererabbit in a world where godlike wereanimals abuse their powers as they rule over and exploit the common people. 4 stars 15. A Chase Beyond the Storms Not a story but a cliffhanger appetizer from the third novel of the Dandelion Dynasty: princess Thera of Dara and her fiancé prince of Agon make it past the wall of storms only to discover they’re being pursued by an enemy city ship equipped with flying dragon-cows. 2 stars 16. The Hidden Girl A general’s daughter from 8th-century Tang Dynasty China is stolen by a nun who trains her to be a multi-dimensional super assassin. Morality and power and ramifications. What will the girl do when told to kill a governor as her graduation test? 4 stars 17. Seven Birthdays The narrator’s relationships with her “mad scientist” mother and her own daughter through birthdays, from age seven to age 823,543 (!), when digital post-humanity has spread throughout the galaxy terraforming worlds and turning planets into giant solar-powered computers. “There is always a technical solution,” but there’s also always human darkness. 4 stars 18. The Message A father who’s never met his 13-year-old daughter Maggie (Liu’s third red-haired Maggie, including The Paper Menagerie stories) takes her to work with him, recording 20,000-year-old alien ruins and translating their message on a planet soon to be blank-slated and terraformed by humanity. The neat ideas on alien human “contact,” uranium, and parental responsibility cross into contrivance and sentimentality. 3 stars 19. Cutting A prose poem story: for generations some monks have been cutting “unnecessary words from their holy book so that over time it has come to look like lace, “like a dissolving honeycomb,” and only words like “experience,” “is,” and “forget” remain. 5 stars In his stories Liu pushes human boundaries and explores ways in which technology transforms society, relationships, and identities. What will happen to humanity if we abandon our bodies to become digital minds or expand throughout the galaxy terraforming planets? He views such issues from multiple sides, making it difficult to decide what we’d do. And his relevant ideas and sublime sf are grounded in human relationships (e.g., parents and children) and experiences (e.g., losing loved ones to time, work, or violence). The four readers of the audiobook are all fine. View all my reviews
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Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Necromancers and Cavaliers in an SF Mystery Romance “In the Myriadic Year of Our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (2019) starts with the 86th attempt 18-year-old Gideon has made to escape from the House of the Ninth: Keepers of the Locked Tomb, House of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals, where reanimated skeleton servants outnumber the living, who paint their faces like skulls, use soap made from human fat, eat snow leaks, and do without weather or sunlight. Gideon’s life as an indentured servant in the decayed necromantic House (“high on ancient shitty treasures but low on liquid assets”) buried in “the darkest hole of the darkest planet and the darkest part of the system” has been boring and gloomy and lonely. When Gideon’s anonymous mother dropped in, dropped Gideon, and died, all 200 children of the Ninth then present quickly succumbed to some virus that somehow spared Gideon and her lone enemy-playmate-mistress Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, Heir to the Ninth House. Well, no wonder Gideon wants to abscond to join the army! This time she’ll surely succeed, won’t she? Alas, 17-year-old Harrowhark foils Gideon’s attempt at the last second to inflict maximum pain on her long-time whipping girl, whom she then informs must become her cavalier, her sworn swordswoman/companion of the “one flesh, one end” variety, which means that she has to take a crash course in manners and fencing (after growing up fighting with a two-handed longsword) and paint her face skull white, all in order to enter with Harrowhark an unprecedented competition to be held at the First House among the top necromancer adepts and their cavaliers from the Second to the Ninth Houses. The winner is to become Lyctor, “an undying necromantic saint” and disciple to the Emperor. If Harrowhark wins, she’ll ostensibly set Gideon free from the Ninth House. Gideon decides to play along. After Gideon and Harrow arrive at Canaan House, the beautiful, dilapidated, labyrinthine site of the competition, the novel speeds up, as they meet a variety of strange and savory “people,” including the priest-host Teacher and the competition: the Second House’s martial discipline pair, the Third’s twin adepts (one gorgeous, one wan) and snide cavalier, the Fourth’s naïve and jumpy fourteen-year-old boy and girl, the Fifth’s hospitable middle-aged couple, the Sixth’s ultra-cool library-medicine experts, the Seventh’s dying adept and hulking cavalier, and the Eighth’s puritanical young uncle adept and stolid old nephew cavalier. Except for being advised not to open locked doors, the competition has no guidelines or rules. Muir does employ rules for her magic system, based on Thanergy (death energy) and Thalergy (life energy), which enable Bone, Flesh, and Spirit magics. One neat touch is that because the void of space has no life and hence no death, travel between planets is risky for necromancers, because they can’t do their usual stuff then. Another neat touch is Harrowhark’s ability to conjure up skeletons from bone fragments: “From as little as a buried femur, a hidden tibia, skeletons formed for Harrow in perfect wholeness, and as Gideon neared their mistress, a tidal wave of reanimated bones crested down on her.” Although the novel at first looks like a standard YA story about an unappreciated and unloved orphan who is super talented and Destined for Big Things, albeit set in an necromantic solar system, it morphs into an And Then There Were None murder mystery and a Hunger Games last one standing challenge and even a cracked romance. And in the end Muir bracingly feels no need to fulfill reader expectations. I enjoyed reading this book because I cared about the characters and wanted to find out what would happen and who would survive and who was the villain and why. I especially loved the hostile odd-couple relationship between Gideon (“Griddle” or “Nav” to Harrowhark) and Harrowhark (Harrow or “my crepuscular queen” to Gideon). They are contrasting and complementing frenemies whose banter is amusing and whose backgrounds reveal unexpected depths. Harrow is a brilliant, stick-like, unhealthy (sweating blood and passing out when overdoing the necromancy), adept heir, Gideon a muscular, physical (“thinking with her arms”), instinctive, cavalier orphan. Can they get in formation to win let alone survive the competition? Or will they just act all “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you” and “I hate it when you act like a butt-touched nun”? Lots of exciting violent action: blades, bone constructs, duels, boss fights, and the like. The climax is full scale and the resolution surprising and moving. And it’s well written—I found myself constantly cracking up and jotting down great figures of speech or lines or descriptions, like-- Similes: “Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda.” “So with extreme reluctance, as of an animal not wanting to take medicine, Gideon tilted her face up to get painted.” “… eyes glittering like beetles beneath the veil, mouth puckered up like a cat's asshole.” “Harrow slithered more deeply underneath the covers like a bad black snake...” “Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost.” Lines: “Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.” “She wouldn't have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out.” Dialogue “Your vow of silence is variable, Ninth.” “I'm variably penitent.” Description: “It was just simply suddenly there, like a nightmare, a squatting vertiginous hulk, a nonsense of bones feathering into long spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily, trailing jellyfish stingers made-up of millions and millions of teeth, all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivered its stingers, then stiffened all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. There was so much of it.” The boss fight goes on a little too long. And it is improbable that with their 10,000-year history, including lots of scientific and necromantic research and interplanetary (at least) space travel and space shuttles, they’d no longer use guns. But it was a great read, a little like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), but with compelling characters, amusing conversations, and moving revelations, and I’m looking forward to the second book. Especially as it’s read by the splendid Moira Quirk. View all my reviews
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars To embrace or reject your inner malificer What’d you do if you were a disliked almost ostracized student in a magical school for future wizards and couldn’t access malia, the shortcut to mana power, because malia is sucked up from living creatures, which will turn you into a malificer (dark magician) and because your magical “affinity” is “laying waste to multitudes,” and you are doing your best not to become the uber-dark queen (“I can blaze a trail to Mordor anytime I want”) enchantress destroyer of worlds? You’d do a lot of situps, pushups, and jumping jacks, with some frustrating crocheting on the side, because physical and mental stress accumulate mana more safely (if more slowly). Thus, 17-year-old junior Galadriel Higgins (call her El but never Gal) is in great shape. Which is another problem, because the stronger she becomes by exercising, the more exercising she has to do to gather mana from her effort! The “Deadly Education” of the title of Naomi Novik’s first Scholomance book (2020) turns out not to refer to what the students of the magical school *learn* but to what traditionally happens to at least half of the students in any given year, with especially high mortality rates for seniors at graduation, the most dangerous part of their educations. The Scholomance is built into a magical void, with only the gate the students walk through at graduation connected to the real world, which is why graduation is so dangerous--the most powerful malefecars (magical demons called mals for short) infesting the school have eaten the weaker ones as they wait at the gate for the graduates to walk through. Novik asks us to believe that magical children from age 13 to 18 would be in greater danger of being eaten by mals out in the world going to schools for “mundanes” (i.e., muggles) than they are when gathered together in the Scholomance, which, unlike Hogwarts, doesn’t have a single teacher or adult wizard in charge on site. We have to accept that those in charge would toss thousands of kids into the school without any adult supervision and without any (recent) attempt to clean out the myriad mals lurking in every nook and cranny, so that to try to reduce the risk of mals eating them the students have to maintain spells of protection on their dorm room doors and go in groups to meals and snack-runs and classes and study sessions and showers (one reason why they smell rather ripe). It develops that enrollment has been increased by including kids whose parents don’t belong to elite, powerful, and wealthy magical “enclaves,” so the riffraff may serve as soft-target gazelles to increase the chances that the enclave kids will survive. But still… Anyway. Novik entertainingly imagines how such a school might function and how students would choose majors (artifice, alchemy, or incantations), attend classes, study, submit homework, get library books, eat meals, trade (spells, artifacts, homework, clothes, etc.), form cliques and alliances, and so on. She also imagines a large number of different mals, including soul-eaters, mimics, sirenspiders, and groglers, each with different methods for catching and eating young wizards in training. Unlike in Harry Potter, magic here is not a free and unlimited resource but is based on power that the magic users have to get from somewhere. El must exercise to generate the minimum magical energy she needs to get by, because she refuses to go the malia route and comes from a mundane commune instead of from a magical enclave, whose kids can access mana pools. Novik checks off (too?) many of the boxes for popular young adult fiction: first-person narrator (blessedly not present tense), protagonist who is a uniquely powerful outsider forced to hide her power, fraught romance, dangerous competitions, sarcastic banter, food details, absence of parental supervision and support, etc. From the catchy first line (“I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life”), the plot, which takes place during about two or three weeks near the end of the school year, is page-turning, as it reveals the details of the magical school and world (El is an expert guide to the Scholomance, saying things like, “Breakfast isn't half as dangerous as dinner, but it's still never good to walk alone”) and develops El’s character (from an excess of “negativity of spirit” to something a little more trusting). Although Novik’s magical world is hetero so far, she does write a wider range of races and cultures and languages than Rowling does in Harry Potter, including El, who is half-Welsh and half-Mumbai Indian and has a Chinese friend, an African friend, and a white friend, Orion Lake, the silver-haired do-gooding combat magic affinity boy from the New York enclave who goes around the school saving other students’ lives, including El’s, much to her chagrin. At her best, Novik writes fine fantasy passages, like this vivid, witty one: “What came flying out of the void in answer was a horrible tome encased in some kind of pale crackly leather with spiked corners that scraped unpleasantly as it skidded to me across the middle of the desk. The leather had probably come off a pig, but someone had clearly wanted you to think it had been flayed from a person, which was almost as bad, and it flipped itself open to a page with instructions for enslaving an entire mob of people to do your bidding.” She writes spicy dialogue, like: “Most people can get through lunch without turning it into an act of war.” “I'm not most people… Also the seating arrangements *are* an act of war.” But there are also some places that try too hard to be YA snarky, like: “In your dreams, rich boy. I'm not one of your groupies.” “Yeah, I didn't notice.” And Novik via El inaccurately disses a great book: “However many literature classes might try to sell you on Lord of the Flies, that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here. We all know we can’t afford to get into stupid fights with one another.” This is a misreading and a misapplication of William Golding’s novel. The reader of the audiobook, Anisha Dadia, inserts pauses even when the text has no punctuation, especially after the first key word of a sentence, which got on my nerves. “Her scream [pause] had already been cut off into a dying gurgle.” Otherwise, she’s a good reader. (Well, El and Orion don’t sound so Welsh and New York.) People who like Harry Potter type fantasy but for/about older kids, like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, should like this book. (There is a frank talk about birth control.) Will I go on to read the second and third entries in the trilogy? Probably, but not as audiobooks! View all my reviews
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Imagination, Thought, Culture, the Other, and Humor The Found and the Lost (2016) collects thirteen of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novellas, ranging from 1971 to 2002 and including eight science fictions, four fantasies, and one historical fiction. The novellas depict unconventional male and female “heroes” (damaged, other, young, old, powerless, brilliant, etc.) who become heroic not by martial or magical violent action, but by holding fast to what’s right despite deprivation, isolation, enslavement, imprisonment, torture etc. Often, they are outsiders, seeing beyond what is “normal” in their cultures or traveling to other worlds. Often, they transcend their cultures and experiences to communicate with and understand the alien other. She writes detailed accounts of different cultures (language, religion, history, families, love, work, etc.) and plenty of poignant romance, frank sex, worldview-enlarging education, and revolutionary change. And many wise insights into life and human nature and the world. And much vivid, sublime description (e.g., "There it lay, a dark, green jewel, like truth, at the bottom of a gravity well”). And lots of sly, dry humor, as in describing a girl who becomes an “Angel” in a religious cult as “soft, mild, and as flexible as a steel mainbeam.” The audiobook would be better if you could easily navigate among the different chapters of the novellas. As it is, you don't know how long any given novella is going to last until it's done. For a long audiobook (35+ hours), good readers are vital, and although Jefferson Mays is fine (despite almost sounding prissily sophisticated at times), Alyssa Bresnahan forces a clipped staccato rhythm onto the text (e.g., “You could teach the wizard [pause] a lesson”). Here is an annotated list of the novellas. "It was not a happy ship." In “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971), an “extreme survey team” of neurotic misfits arrives beyond the pale at planet 4470, a jade world full of unknown plant life. Their greatest problem is the empath Osden, who looks like a flayed albino and reflects everyone’s antipathy in a toxic feedback loop. Can the team members open up to the alien other with love instead of fear? 4 stars (Mays) “Yes, you can keep your eye.” In “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1987), a Native American mythology-flavored, female-centered Jungle Book, “Gal” survives a plane crash and is mothered and mentored by the earthy, uber-female Coyote, living among the first people of America, like Chickadee, Jackrabbit, and Bluejay, while learning about her own people, “the new people,” European Americans, the “illegal immigrants,” who are taking over America. 3 stars (Bresnahan) “What can I say that you can hear?” “Hernes” (1991) relates key moments from the lives of four Herne women—Fanny, her daughter Jane, her daughter Lily, and her daughter Virginia—from 1898 till 1979 as they try to live free and fulfilled in Oregon despite feckless or entitled men, amid vivid descriptions of nature (like unceasing female sea foam and dwindling elk), finally tarnished by plastic trash and oil spills. 4 stars (Bresnahan) “’My life is wrong.’ But she did not know how to make it right.” Through reports, stories, interviews, etc. “The Matter of Seggri” (1994) tells the history of Seggri, a planet where women outnumber men 16-1 and where men live in “castles” and can only play violent sports and service women in “fuckeries,” while women live in “motherhouses” and do all the physical and intellectual work. Will the utopian Ekumen turn them on to “The body's unalterable dream of mutuality”? 5 stars (Mays) “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time.” In “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994) Hideo tells of growing up on a farm on planet O, where the traditional marriage is a complex set of two male and two female members. At18, he leaves his home and family to go study physics on Hain, researching a new technology to permit instantaneous travel through space with unexpected consequences, all in the context of a poignant love story. 4 stars (Mays) “I feel like an oaf blundering into your soul.” In “Forgiveness Day” (1994), a cocky young Ekumen envoy on Werel, a slave-system world, chafes at being “protected” by a “cold and inhuman” bodyguard she scornfully nicknames “the Major.” And then we switch to his point of view. A collision of opposites: male/female, diplomat/soldier, traditional/international. What will a terrorist attack and a kidnapping do to the pair? 4 stars (Bresnahan) “All knowledge is local, all truth partial.” “A Man of the People” (1994) is about a man raised in a traditional, lineage- and gender-based community on Hain being sent as an Ekumen envoy to Yeowe, Werel’s former slave colony world, there to facilitate the fraught change from a male dominated slave society to an egalitarian one. Can you retain your identity and home while seeking the alien other? 4 stars (Mays) “The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.” “A Woman’s Liberation” (1994) consists of a woman telling her life story, being born a slave on a plantation on Werel, becoming a sex pet of the mistress, then a “use-woman” on another plantation, then immigrating to the “liberated” Yeowe and learning history and working for equality. “It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women.” 4 stars (Bresnahan) “He is my great gift… You do hold my joy.” In “Old Music and the Slave Women” (1999), during a civil war between the Army of Liberation (led by white slaves) and the Legitimate Government (led by black owners), the 62-year-old “alien” Ekumen ambassador to Werel, Esdardon Aya, is captured by a faction, taken to a ruined plantation, tortured, and befriends some female slaves, one with a dying baby. He’s no John Carter! 4.5 stars (Mays) “I will not work in the service of evil.” “The Finder” is a moving story about love, power, education, community, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny in Earthsea. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a mad wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. Couldn’t the world use a school for magic for men *and* women? 4 stars (Bresnahan) “The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.” In “On the High Marsh” (2001) a ruined man with a beautiful voice, shows up at the farm of the widow Gift, who thinks he’s a king or a beggar, senses that he is kind and true, and offers him hospitality, so he works as a curer, healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. Who is he running from? Is he dangerous? Enter a scarred stranger called Hawk... 5 stars (Mays) “She had no wisdom but her innocence, no armor but her anger.” In “Dragonfly” a large, beautiful, uneducated young woman of undefined power wants to find out who she is, so she tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards and catalyzes a change in the school. The relationship between her and an expelled student from Roke is neat. 4 stars (Bresnahan) “People are a risky business.” “Paradises Lost” (2002) interestingly extrapolates a 4000-person culture hermetically sealed in a generation spaceship traveling on a 200-year voyage of scientific discovery from earth to a destination planet. The funny and moving story explores nature, civilization, reality, religion, life, sex, family, education, freedom, poetry, love, and more. 4.5 stars (Mays) The novellas demonstrate the wonderful range, consistency, and quality of Le Guin’s writing. View all my reviews
Tales of Wonder by Lord Dunsany
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Things of Value Thrown out of a Burning House “And at last, when melancholy brought only regret and the uselessness of his work gained round him with age, he decided to consult a magician.” Most of Lord Dunsany’s nineteen Tales of Wonder (1916) depict such yearning to escape the everyday real world of London, work, business, steel, gas, etc. for the magical, beautiful, and exciting world of fantasy. Drugs (e.g., hashish or “bash”) or alcohol (e.g., rum or “Gorgondy”) may ease the passage or open the vision to “the Edge of the World,” the liminal site of wondrous adventures or sights (milk, “a cursed beverage,” won’t work). Even in stories where the real world is not transcended, it is transformed (as with the Bureau d'Exchange de Maux), or larger than life protagonists (like Shard, Captain of Pirates) attempt amazing feats in it. Dunsany’s imagination is fertile and original, his writing style rich and elegant, and his tone playful with wistful, ironic, and ominous undertones. The following passage embodies the pleasures of Dunsany's fantasy: “And so with painful steps (for the shores of the world are covered with huge crystals) he came to the risky seas of Shiroora Shan and saw them pounding to gravel the wreckage of fallen stars, saw them and heard their roar, those shipless seas that between earth and the fairies' homes heave beneath some huge wind that is none of our four. And there in the darkness on the grizzly coast, for darkness was swooping slantwise down the sky as though with some evil purpose, there stood that lonely, gnarled and deciduous tree. It was a bad place to be found in after dark, and night descended with multitudes of stars, beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered [See any dictionary, but in vain.] at Neepy Thang.” And here is an annotated list of the stories: In “A Tale of London,” a Baghdad “hasheesh eater” dreams of the wonders of “the desiderate” city of London, transforming it into an exotic Arabian Nights-like place. “Thirteen at Table” depicts the unintentional exorcism of a haunted manor house via an offensive joke. In “The City on Mallington Moor” an alcoholic shepherd helps the narrator access a fabulous city of white marble and gold minarets in the British moors via a strange rum-like beverage. “Why the Milkman Shudders when he Perceives the Dawn” is a teaser story with a great hook-question that’s never answered, because we’re not of the company of milkmen. “The Bad Old Woman in Black” is another teaser story in which said woman is rumored to have run down the ox-butchers’ street, leaving unanswered questions in her wake, like “What future evil did this portend?” In “The Bird of the Difficult Eye,” if the renowned jewel thief Neepy Thang can steal the eggs of a mythical bird before they can hatch, they’ll turn into extraordinary emeralds; otherwise, it will be “a bad business indeed.” *Here’s Sidney Sime's exquisite illustration of the Bird:* The narrator of “The Long Porter's Tale” hears a story about a quest for an old woman’s song leading to a wondrous city at the edge of the world. “The Loot of Loma” is a Native American pastiche, with warriors who raid Loma stealing four of its idols and, unwittingly, a secret curse. “The Secret of the Sea” reveals that when an entire ship’s crew falls down drunk, their ship goes its own secret way to the Temple in the Sea to meet other similarly free ships, but we cannot know “what lyrical or blasphemous thing their figureheads prayed by moonlight at midnight in the sea.” In “How Ali Came to the Black Country,” a man with the seal of King Solomon comes from Persia (on foot) to save England from the devil Steam, but when asked to save it from the devil Petrol, he says, "And shall a man go twice to the help of a dog?" The fine concept of “The Bureau d'Exchange de Maux”—a bureau d’exchange where the “goods” exchanged are evils, the narrator trading his sea-sickness for another man’s fear of lifts—is marred by antisemitism. To evade the pursuit of five navies in “A Story of Land and Sea,” the pirate captain Shard unprecedentedly sails his “merry” but “volatile” men on his “rakish craft the Desperate Lark” through the Sahara, only to run afoul of some stubborn Arabs. In “A Tale of the Equator” a poet so vividly tells of a wondrous land lying south of the world and the fabulous palace his Sultan will have built there that the Sultan says, "It will be unnecessary for my builders to build this palace, Erlathdronion, Earth's Wonder, for in hearing thee we have drunk already its pleasures." “A Narrow Escape” features a jaded magician who decides to wreck London, requiring for the purpose the heart of a particular toad. In “The Watch-Tower,” an old man claiming to be the spirit of an old Provencal tower tells the narrator to beware of the Saracens, who’ve been gone for 400 years. In “How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None's Desire” a single combat between a giant and an ugly dwarf ends unexpectedly. “The Three Sailors' Gambit” is about a team of three sailors who seem ignorant of chess but beat a legendary master in two straight games, thanks to the devil, a crystal, and a soul. After riffing on forgotten gods, the narrator of “The Exiles’ Club” is invited by an exiled king to a dinner attended by other exiled monarchs, whereat a faux pas reveals that the ex-kings are but the waiters for the real members of the club, who are "upstairs" and prone to flinging lightning bolts at curs. In “The Three Infernal Jokes,” the narrator meets a tout who regrets having received three killing jokes as part of a fateful bargain. Although the best stories here are good, I found this collection less wonderful than the earlier Book of Wonder (1912), and I had trouble remembering the stories enough to write about them. Partly that’s due to the readers of the LibriVox version I listened to being less than stellar (though Sandra reads her stories fine), but it's also due to some of the stories being short, teaser-ish, or insubstantial. One of the best lines in the collection comes at the end of Dunsany’s Preface, written in 1916 while he was recovering from a wound: “And now I will write nothing further about our war, but offer you these books of dreams from Europe as one throws things of value, if only to oneself, at the last moment out of a burning house.” View all my reviews
The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The Universe is Knowable” or “People Do Strange Things for Love” The first novel in Ken Liu’s Chinese-flavored, “silk punk” historical epic fantasy-sf Dandelion Dynasty series, The Grace of Kings (2015), ends with the good-natured, ex-small-time gangster Kuni Garu drinking with the friends who helped him do the “interesting thing” by becoming Emperor of the islands of Dara. Ah, poor Kuni! As the second novel, The Wall of Storms (2016) begins five years into his reign, its name, Four Placid Seas, has become a misnomer, and he’s learned that winning an empire is far easier than maintaining one. He wants to make life better for his people, especially the commoners and women, but everyone (advisors, nobles, scholars, generals, merchants, farmers, rebels, and even his two wives, Empress Jia and Consort Risana) is competing for their own piece of the imperial pie. Perhaps what is needed to unify the fractious empire is an invasion by a formidable barbarian horde equipped with winged, fire-breathing ruminants? Ken Liu fully imagines his fantasy world, giving a Chinese cast to the main Daran culture (eating sticks, tripod drinking cups, logograms, different forms of bowing and sitting, emperors, advisors, etc.), retaining most of the flora and fauna of our world (horses, cows, wolves, etc.) while inserting exotic new ones (the gargantuan, horned, scaled whale-like crubin and the dragon-analogue garanafin, etc.), making the world and its inhabitants mostly conform to earth’s natural laws while introducing a pantheon of kibitzing and encouraging but (ostensibly) not directly interfering gods. He creates a long, rich history, complete with schools of philosophy (Fluxists, Moralists, Patternists, etc.), classical poetry, storytelling, festivals, crafts, and so on. While the first novel restricts itself to the Islands of Dara (and its empire), this second one introduces a far-off scrubland continent peopled by white barbarians partaking of Viking and Mongol qualities, hitherto cut off from Dara (and vice versa) by the wall of storms (a wall of massive cyclones). Liu’s large story unfolds via the educating, learning, strategizing, scheming, betraying, loving, and fighting of his fully human, flawed, and believable characters: no cardboard evil dark lords or pure heroes here. He develops strong figures from the first novel (like Luan Zya and Kuni Garu) and introduces interesting new ones (like Princess Thera and Pekyu Tenryo, the king of the Licyu “barbarians”). The female characters are more fully developed and complex than in the first book: Empress Jia, a ruthless rationalizer who trusts in systems rather than individuals and wants to make a stable state by reducing the power of the nobles and isolating the glory-seeking “heroes”; Marshal/Queen Gin, a heroic strategist general who scorns Jia’s schemes; Zomi Kidosu, a crippled, proud, and brilliant young scholar who wants to pass the first imperial examinations to win an important post at court; Thera, who loathes the idea of becoming a marriage pawn in the imperial game while either her wannabe hero brother or her wannabe scholar brother will succeed their father as Emperor. Not to mention Vadyu Roatan, a clever and bold barbarian princess-warrior skilled at piloting her cow-dragon garinafin. The ways in which Liu weaves these women’s destinies together are surprising and interesting. He injects plenty of thoughtful ideas and life wisdom into his novels, with great lines like: “A child who takes no risks will not lead an interesting life.” “Talent is like a pretty feather in the tail of a Peacock. It brings joy to the powerful but only sorrow to the bird.” “Patriotism, like white rice, was a luxury of the well to do.” “Every day in the life of a common flower is a day of battle.” “But memory was a lump of wax that was shaped by consciousness with each recollection.” “The only duty any child owes to her parent is to live a life that is true to her nature.” He writes culturally suitable similes, like “his voice so stiff it bounced off the wall like roasted chestnuts,” and savory lines, like “The inside of a cow's stomach is a complicated world.” The fantasy elements are pretty much limited to the gods, because Liu is an sf writer at heart, so that his “dragons,” airships, submarines, “silkmotic” weapons, “magic” mirrors, and so on have natural, scientific explanations for their workings. Instead of magic, then, there’s science and technology, engineering, logograms, engineering, machines, etc. Themes from the first novel developed in this one are that All life is an experiment; that Love makes one do strange things; and that The boundary between history and story is blurry: “Like all true stories, it was a mix of legends and facts, of myths imagined and deeds done, of the heart of darkness and the crown of light, of experiences borne and gaps filled, of things seen and visions that could only be authenticated by the mind’s eye.” Liu can write some bad lines of dialogue, jarring in their contemporary colloquial register, like, “Let's get out of here.” And there are moments where characters do disappointing things I can’t quite believe they’d do based on their characters developed up to those points. In the middle of the novel, I found myself muttering something like, “I can’t believe A would be so dense!” or “Wouldn’t B think of that?” And sometimes the gods get a little too hands on. Things could have gotten interesting for the empire more convincingly. While the first book ends in a comfortable resting place, this one does not, and I liked the first two books enough to probably soldier on to find out what will happen to the characters and cultures, but I can’t help but notice that each book in his Dandelion Dynasty series is longer than the one before, going from 21 hours, to 28, to 38, and then to a whopping 41, so I hope that he’s not succumbing to Success Bloat. Michael Kramer is a capable, appealing narrator, his base narration reminiscent of the excellent Grover Gardener, but his god voices tend towards the overly dramatic. View all my reviews
The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The End of Earthsea, or Dreams and Dragons, the Living and the Dead The Other Wind (2001) begins fifteen years after the end of Tehanu (1990), as small-town sorcerer Alder (from Taon), whose gift is to mend things, travels to Gont to see seventy-year-old Ged (the former Archmage) to tell him his trouble: every night in his sleep he has been visiting the dry land of the dead and is terrified that they will make him free them to return to the world of the living. It started with a dream where his beloved, recently deceased wife's soul kissed him—bruising his mouth—and asked him to free her. Since then, crowds of dead souls have been asking him the same thing. Unable to help Alder, the “wise” wizards of Roke (Masters of magic) have sent him to consult Ged. When Ged starts dreaming of the dry land, too, he reckons that some change is happening and working through Alder. Ged gets good old Aunty Moss to give Alder one of her kittens, and when the feline sleeps with him its warm touch prevents him from dreaming: “Maybe a cat is as good as a master of Roke.” Finally, Ged sends Alder on to Havnor, where Tenar and Tehanu are staying in the palace of King Lebannen to advise him about the increasingly aggressive dragon incursions into the Archipelago, sensing a connection between the dreams and the dragons… The rest of the compact novel sets out to resolve the outstanding issues from the earlier stories: death and dragons and human beings and animals. It also develops the characters of people we’ve come to love in Earthsea, like Lebannen, Tehanu, Tenar, and Ged, while introducing compelling new ones like Alder and the Kargish “barbarian” princess Seserakh. There is dragon diplomacy; a multi-national, multi-class, multi-species, multi-gender quest; a cute gambling game played with the islands of the Archipelago as stakes; and an unexpected way for Alder to employ his mending gift after he’s surrendered it. The Other Wind is an unusual book. It’s a page-turner that made me forget everything in the real world outside for hours at a time as I was reading, while lacking almost all the usual kinds of heroic fantasy action. We hear in passing about King Lebannen taking out a bad slavery piracy kind of force a while ago, and we hear references to things like a wizard dueling a dragon to mutual death long ago, but the present adventure is psychological, emotional, and spiritual rather than physical. There is no dark lord figure like Cob in The Farthest Shore, but rather a bad choice that some influential people made a long time ago. Although the stakes couldn’t be higher, the novel may bore people who require plenty of violent action in black-white conflicts between good-evil. As for me, I reread many sentences several times to savor their rhythm, image, idea, beauty, or power, like when Alder is introducing his dream about his dead wife to Ged: After a while he said, “We had great joy.” “I see that.” “And my sorrow was in that degree.” The old man nodded. “I could bear it” Alder said. “You know how it is. There is not much reason to be living that I could see, but I could bear it.” “Yes.” “But in the winter. Two months after her death. There was a dream came to me. She was in the dream.” “Tell it.” Or like when Ged, who has permanently used up all his power and is “just” an old man, watches Alder (with nostalgia if not envy) as he mends a Tenar’s favorite broken pitcher: “Now, fascinated, he watched Alder's hands. Slender, strong, deft, unhurried, they cradled the shape of the pitcher, stroking and fitting and settling the pieces of pottery, urging and caressing, the thumbs coaxing and guiding the smaller fragments into place, reuniting them, reassuring them. While he worked he murmured a two-word, tuneless chant. They were words of the Old Speech. Ged knew and did not know their meaning. Alder's face was serene, all stress and sorrow gone: a face so wholly absorbed in time and task that timeless calm shone through it. His hands separated from the pitcher, opening out from it like the sheath of a flower opening. It stood on the oak table, whole. He looked at it with quiet pleasure.” I like that Le Guin doesn't put people above animals as Pullman kind of does in His Dark Materials. “What’s the difference between animals and us? Maybe the difference isn’t language but that animals do and are, while we choose what we do? They’re beyond good and evil, but we have to choose them?” Anyway, we should all be part of the same cycle of life and death. It is neat how she depicts Seserakh as a lioness with humor and courage and beauty (of course) and brains, and it is moving and effective how she shows the King get over his fear of her (and of women in a group) through the course of the adventure. I'm still sad that Ged refuses to have any contact with Lebannen, who loves him and would do anything he wanted him to do. I know Le Guin is showing Ged as being done with doing and not wanting to be perceived as influencing the young king, but it still seems a little too unsentimental (if not perverse) to deny the reader (this reader!?) a little reunion candy. I also think that she may do a BIT too much summarizing of events from the past novels and “Dragonfly” so as to bring readers new to Earthsea up to speed here; at times it reads like a Greatest Earthsea Hits medley. Anyway, Le Guin is a great writer of ethical, moral, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical fantasy; simple on the surface but with depths beneath and behind; capable of sublime scenes and earthy ones. And it is amazing how what happens in this book to solve the mystery of humans and dragons and life and death does nothing to violate the first book she wrote in the series back in 1968, almost as though she knew where she'd end up. It shows how carefully thought out and rich her created world and stories in it are. (However, it also thins her fantasy world of much of its fantasy.) Almost every word in this novel is where it should be; everything works for and towards her metaphoric and symbolic and thematic ends. The audiobook reader Samuel Roukin is fine, with a nice British voice and a perfect manner for Ged and Alder, except for one nearly fatal flaw: he distractingly keeps changing the pronunciation of Irian’s name, sometimes within the speech of a single character. View all my reviews
Paradise Lost by John Milton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wowed by imagination and language-- Milton’s Puritan epic Paradise Lost (1667/74) gets off to an amazing start with Book I. The compelling anti-hero Satan and his fellow fallen angels have just been exiled from Heaven to Hell, “this dark and dismal house of pain,” where they speed-build Pandemonium. It's all sublime fantasy, majestic poetry, vivid language, wonderful epic similes, and absorbing psychology. Many delicious phrases like “by harpy-footed Furies hail'd” and “Hell trembled as he strode” and famous lines like “The mind is its own place, and in it self/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n” and “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.” Check out this wonderful description of Satan: Then with expanded wings he stears his flight Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land He lights, if it were Land that ever burn'd With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire; And this epic simile describing his “ponderous shield,” whose broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe. And this fantastic physiology: For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is thir Essence pure, Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure, Can execute thir aerie purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfill. Yikes—I’d better get going on my *concise* summary of the next eleven books! In Book II, the impious crew debate their next move: Hunker down in Hell? Naw. Renew the war against Heaven? Better not. Revenge ourselves on God by messing with his newest creation, man? Hmm. Satan meets his daughter Sin and his son/grandson by her (!), Death, and then scouts out earth, hanging there from a gold chain, ripe for the tainting. In Book III Satan approaches earth as God watches without interfering: his creations have free will, else no point in creating them. Someone will have to die to balance man’s impending sin and thereby save man for grace! Volunteers? What about the Son of God? *The sacrifice feels less heroic when Jesus declares that he’ll defeat Death by being resurrected. In Book IV, Satan spies on paradise, violently conflicted as to whether to submit to God or to mess up man, deciding on the latter, because “my self am Hell.” Adam and Eve are insufferably innocent, Eve revoltingly obedient to Adam (“my Guide/ And Head”), saying things like, “God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more/ Is womans happiest knowledge and her praise.” I thus get a kick out of Satan enviously watching them and saying things like, You’ll soon join me in my less pleasing place! *Our pre-fall “general ancestors” Adam and Eve shamelessly have sex ‘cause God wants them to have pleasure (in wedlock) and to increase. In Book V Raphael pep talks Adam about obedience and contentment. He explains why God gave his creations free will (without it, obedience is meaningless) and recounts the story of Satan’s rebellion (sparked by his jealousy over God’s promotion of Jesus), including a rebel-rousing speech to the angels: are we going “to begirt th' Almighty Throne/ Beseeching or besieging”? And, hey, paradise is delightful: Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh field Calls us, we lose the prime, to mark how spring Our tended Plants, how blows the Citron Grove, What drops the Myrrhe, and what the balmie Reed, How Nature paints her colours, how the Bee Sits on the Bloom extracting liquid sweet. In Book VI Raphael vividly depicts to Adam the three-day war between Satan and his minions and God and his. It’s like a mini-Iliad—but nobody dies, because though the angels feel pain, they are immortal, ethereal, and quick-healing. The “obsequious” angels rout the “atheist” rebels, who return with dread new war engines only to be smothered by some sacred mountains, until finally the Son of God kicks the impious crew out of Heaven and sends them falling nine days to Hell. Book VII has Raphael vividly tell Adam how God created the heavens, earth, light, dark, lands, seas, plants, creatures, etc. in six days. It too closely follows Genesis—though there are splendid descriptions of animals coming into existence. In Book VIII Adam tells Raphael his memories of being created, not unlike Frankenstein’s creature telling his story (except Adam had a loving and caring creator), including God interdicting the knowledge tree. And the making of Eve from Adam’s rib. Adam’s account of waking up alive for the first time and enjoying his new world and body is splendid: By quick instinctive motion up I sprung, As thitherward endevoring, and upright Stood on my feet; about me round I saw Hill, Dale, and shadie Woods, and sunnie Plaines, And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these, Creatures that livd, and movd, and walk'd, or flew, Birds on the branches warbling; all things smil'd, With fragrance and with joy my heart oreflow'd. Starting with another super Satanic soliloquy as the fiend possesses a serpent’s body, Book IX relates the tempting of Eve and-- So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost. Wow. Adam decides to eat and die with Eve. Fruit-full and intoxicated, they enjoy carnal pleasure till they pass out, waking up the next day hungover and recriminatory, like any bickering couple: Why didn’t you stay by me? Why didn’t you force me to stay? In Book X Jesus compassionately punishes the sinners. God curses the poor serpent (more victim than Adam and Eve!). God/Jesus tells Adam the moral: your wife was made to serve you, so you lost all when you unleashed her. Sin and Death make a bridge over chaos from hell to earth (“Mace petrific”! “Gorgonian rigor”! “Asphaltic slime”!), while Satan oversees the anti-terraforming of the earth, making it hostile to man. In Book XI, Jesus brings Adam and Eve’s repentant prayers to God, who says death will remedy their pain and lead to a better second life, and Michael goes to banish the penitents from Eden but give them hope, so he reveals to Adam the future, from Cain and Abel to the Flood. Eve promises Adam, “I’ll never from your side stray,” while bruising the serpent becomes their life goal. In Book XII, Michael continues revealing the future to Adam, listing horrible diseases and deaths (thanks, Eve!) and relating the Exodus and Christ Redeemer stories: goodness infinite to bring grace out of evil, the fortunate fall. Michael preaches virtue, faith, patience, temperance, love, charity: paradise within thee. And our father and mother exit Eden, Eve in meek submission, and “the World was all before them.” About the Naxos audiobook, Anton Lesser reads the poem with understanding, empathy, wit, and pleasure; lovely melancholy music by John Jenkins and William Lawes, English composer contemporaries of Milton, introduces and concludes the twelve books. Finally, I recoil from the sexist Christian vision of the poem, and its Bible summaries bore me, but the insight that we have heaven or hell within us according to our thoughts, actions, and personalities, rings true. And the language, imagination, epic similes, and Satan are all wonderful. View all my reviews
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “All life is an experiment” The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) by Ken Liu collects fifteen stories ranging from Stapledonian cosmic exploration and evolution through steampunk alternate histories and cyberpunk serial killer thrillers to Chinese legends and postmodern “documentaries.” It features clear writing, convincing characters, unpredictable plots, serious themes, and neat plays with genre elements. His stories often foreground intercultural interaction and exotic Chinese culture, including foods, superstitions, paper money offerings for spirits, and written characters. The character for autumn is composed of the characters for fire and for rice/millet, because in the north of China in autumn they harvested grain and burnt the stalks to fertilize the fields. And the character for autumn combines with that for heart to make sorrow or worry. Liu’s Preface explains that the stories show his interests and that any story is a translation: we can’t be sure how people who read it understand it, but writing and reading stories bring people closer together. “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” explains the writing and books of interstellar species, including ones who write and read with their proboscises, mechanical ones whose stone brains are books, energy “field potentials” who read stars and planets and black hole event horizons, and a tiny people who collect other species’ obsolete books and turn them into tiny cities. (4 stars) In “State Change” Rina is a quiet young woman who believes that her soul is an ice cube. If it melts, she’ll die, she thinks, so she keeps it in a refrigerator by her bed at home and in a freezer by her desk at work, where she is completely ignored—no one knows her name—until a friendly new guy starts working there. Could she be wrong about souls? (3.5 stars) In “The Perfect Match” a search Engine called Centillion has become a lifestyle tool based on data collection. Sai’s virtual assistant Tilly plays wake up music for him, sets him up with compatible women, and suggests discounted products for him to buy. Ala Fahrenheit 451’s Clarisse and Montag, Sai’s neighbor Jenny makes him see his life in a new way. (3.5 stars) In “Good Hunting” the son of a demon hunter narrator tells his story over many years, as the traditional Chinese superstitions and magics and supernatural beings like fox demonesses are dying out and being replaced by seemingly more powerful western technology of trains, engines, and clockwork. The story has a weird, transcendent climax. (4 stars) “The Literomancer” is about a Texan girl in Taiwan, the magic power words have to affect the world and our lives in it, the awful things done by one group to another for “noble” reasons, and the tragedy of children discovering that their parents are not admirable. (5 stars) Through the plot lens of a new kind of camera and the fraught relationship between inventor father and estranged daughter, “Simulacrum” explores the nature of reality in the context of human attempts to capture it (and probably thereby to lose or avoid it). (3 stars) In “The Regular” a meticulous serial killer of prostitutes is sought in Boston by a 49-year-old private eye with a traumatic past requiring a spinal implant “regulator” to control her emotions. The story is too much of its genre, lasts too long, and ends in a too pat climax. (3 stars) In “The Paper Menagerie” the American narrator recounts how his relationship with his Chinese mother changed from loving, imaginative, and fun when he was little and speaking Chinese and playing with the paper animals she made for him and animated with her breath, to distant as he aged, became more American, and forced her to speak English. (5 stars) “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition” features an account of memory and cognition in different species (like one made of uranium), while the narrator tells his daughter why the child’s mother went on a mission out into the solar system to try to catch alien communications. After all, the world is a boat. (4 stars) In “The Waves,” the people traveling on an exploratory generation ship evolve through renewable flesh, uploaded consciousnesses, and steel bodies and silicon brains to become beings of light, while Maggie tells ancient origin stories from earth. (4 stars) “Mono No Aware” is about the last 1000 or so human beings in the universe traveling on a “habitat module” called The Hopeful to 61 Virginis. We get the background for all this and a message about the transience of life (we’re all ephemeral cicadas) from the narration of a young Japanese man: “a kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.” (3 stars) In “All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu the Chinese God of War in America” Lord Guan, the 3rd-century Chinese hero God of War, (possibly) appears in frontier-era Idaho City. As in “The Literomancer,” a red-haired white girl called Lily meets a kind Chinese man who introduces her to Chinese culture, though here he learns the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake” from Lily’s father instead of being tortured by him. (4 stars) Set during the golden age of the Qing Dynasty, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” features a “legal hooligan” who helps the poor in their legal conflicts with the rich. Egged on by the trickster Monkey King, the master has to deal with a verboten book and an exiled student as the comedic story turns heroic. “We are all just ordinary men faced with extraordinary choices.” (4.5 stars) “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” recounts how a 1938 trans-Pacific submarine tunnel linking Japan, China, and America prevented World War Two, maintained Japan's East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and led to various technologies being innovated earlier than in our world. The Formosan narrator who worked on the tunnel tells the source of his nightmares to his American lover. (3 stars.) “The Man Who Ended History” uses an sf time travel breakthrough (photons, sub-atomic particles, the human brain, etc.) to relate the Japanese Unit 731’s appalling experiments (exposure, amputation, syphilis, etc.) on living and unanesthetized Chinese children, men, and (pregnant) women during the World War II era, killing up to 500,000 people. The story explores hegemony, history, memory, narrative, truth, and human nature. Does the Chinese American scholar of Japanese history Evan Wei end or free history via his and his Japanese American physicist wife Akemi Kirino’s invention? The “story,” a documentary composed of excerpts from interviews, news shows, hearings, and articles, warns that calling men like the doctors of Unit 731 “monsters” distances us from them when really anyone is capable of such behavior. The story devastated me--I’ve been living in Japan for thirty years. (4.5 stars) The audiobook lacks the reproductions of the Chinese characters described in “The Literomancer” and the notes and dedication (“to the memory of Iris Chang and all the victims of Unit 731”) after the last story. The readers Corey Brill and Joy Osmanski are capable. View all my reviews
Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “What matters is whose house we live in and who we let enter ours.” Ursula K. Le Guin’s fifth Earthsea book, Tales from Earthsea (2001), collects two novellas, three short stories, and a Description of Earthsea. Though some of the tales are better than others, all of them are vintage Le Guin: thought-provoking, imaginative, original, moving, and poetically and precisely written. The characters are compelling and the action suspenseful, without relying on violent action. Except for the novella “Dragonfly,” which is “a dragon bridge” between the fourth and fifth Earthsea novels, the stories are stand alones. In the Foreword (well read by Christina Moore), Le Guin talks about things like the commodification of fantasy, how she came to revisit Earthsea after having subtitled Tehanu “The *Last* Book of Earthsea,” and how real world history writing is similar to fantasy world history writing. All with her wit and clarity. “The Finder” is a moving novella about love, power, learning/teaching, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny, similar to what is going on around the later chaotic time of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s natural gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a crazy, amoral wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. How this hellish situation leads to the founding of Roke School (by men *and* women) makes an interesting story. Especially moving and neat are Otter’s relationships with a nude, deformed, mercury-poisoned female slave and with a pirate king’s “crafty man” finder, the Hound. “All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.” (4 stars) “Darkrose and Diamond” is a romantic story about Diamond, the gifted son of a wealthy lumber merchant, who thinks he can only choose one thing, music, magic, or business, though his mother believes that everything in life is connected, tangled together. Will Diamond follow his bliss and his heart or fulfill his father’s desires? Will Diamond’s beloved Darkrose, daughter of a witch, fit into his life? Le Guin has decided that the voluntary celibacy of wizards is misguided, unnecessary, and possibly harmful. “Why can’t you have everything you want?” (3.5 stars) In order to try to save Gont Port Town from being destroyed by an earthquake, the old wizard Dulse teams up with his former student Ogion to use a powerful elemental spell taught Dulse by his teacher Ard sixty years earlier. The perfectly crafted story, about relationships between teachers and students, fathers and sons, friends and friends, and humans and the earth, is moving. It also says subtle, potent things about gender. It’s poignant to see Ged’s old teacher as a young man. “In the dark under the water all islands touch and are one.” (5 stars) The widow Gift thinks that a traveler who shows up one day at her farm is a king or a beggar. He is surely broken and may be mad, but she senses that he is a kind and true man and offers him hospitality, and he sets about healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. The story is like a western in which a damaged gunfighter shows up in a small town, hides his guns for fear of harming another person with them, and works on a widow’s ranch. What is the man’s story? Who is he running from? Is he dangerous or safe? When a scarred stranger called Hawk shows up at Gift’s farm, we expect a wizardly showdown. Will Le Guin subvert genre again? Her story is a moving middle-aged romance. “The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.” (4.5 stars) “Dragonfly” is a novella about an uneducated, uncouth, large, vital, beautiful young woman who wants to find out who she is and so tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards disguised as a young man and catalyzes a change in the school. The story develops more of the human/dragon thing introduced by Tehanu. The relationship between Irian and a bitter expelled wizard from Roke called Ivory, is neat and funny. I love it when he tries to cast a love spell on Irian, and she punches him while her dog grins at him. The story links Tehanu (1990) to The Other Wind (2001). “I think we should go to our house and open its doors.” (4 stars) After the five tales comes A Description of Earthsea, in which Le Guin writes a kind of encyclopedia entry on Earthsea, with topics like the traits and cultures and histories of the Hardic, Kargad, and Dragon peoples (including their Languages, Writing and Magic), the School on Roke, and Celibacy and Wizardry. Most of this appears here and there throughout her six Earthsea books, but it’s ever a pleasure to read Le Guin’s writing. (3 stars) The audiobook closes with a new Afterword (well read by Christina Moore) in which Le Guin explains why she published the fifth book of tales before she wrote the sixth novel. She uses an analogy between the “uncertain beginning of the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony,” wherein he’s searching for the right way to go forward, and what she was trying to do with these tales: find the right way to finish her Earthsea cycle. She also talks about the need for the reality of imaginative fantasy literature in our contemporary virtual world. The audiobook reader Jenny Sterlin is prime. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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